Some in the open source community speculated that Mono was dead following Miguel de Icaza’s departure from Novell after the deal with Attachmate. But this week, the open source development platform has risen, with the full support of SUSE and Xamarin, the company de Icaza founded to keep it alive.

The companies announced a partnership agreement that grants Xamarin license to all intellectual property covering Mono, MonoTouch, Mono for Android and Mono Tools for Visual Studio, and responsibility for technical support for SUSE customers using Mono-based products. Xamarin will also assume stewardship of the Mono open source community project.

Mono is a software platform designed to allow developers to easily create cross-platform applications using the .NET ecosystem of code, libraries and tools on non-Windows platforms, including Linux, Mac OS X, Apple iOS and Google Android.

“This partnership is a triple win — a win for SUSE, a win for Xamarin, but most importantly, a win for our customers, users and community,” said Nils Brauckmann, president and general manager of SUSE. “Our partnership ensures SUSE customers continue to get the best support possible, enables the bright team at Xamarin to achieve success in their promising new venture, and provides continuity of stewardship for the Mono open source community project in the very capable hands of its most passionate evangelists.”

“We are a young company, but we are completely dedicated to these mobile products and we can not wait to bring smiles to every one of our customers.”

It looks like Android is the biggest target of the Mono development efforts, as the project didn’t ever seem to get much traction in the Linux desktop development space.

On his blog, de Icaza wrote “In the past couple of months, we have met with some of our users and we have learned a lot about what you wanted. We incorporated your feature requests into our products roadmaps for both the MonoTouch and the Mono for Android products.”

For Android, bug fixes are the immediate focus, with medium and long-term plans that include support for Java APIs and asychronous C# 5 programming.

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